


Called Out In The Dark

by epsilonargus



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dark Magic, F/F, F/M, M/M, Necromancy, Unseen Gods
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2019-03-20 18:53:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13723887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epsilonargus/pseuds/epsilonargus
Summary: Harry Potter died in the Battle of Hogwarts. Seven years after the end of the Second Wizarding War, Draco Malfoy is now a brilliant Healer, who has saved hundreds of lives. But his own mother is dying from an incurable disease, and he is desperate to save her. His anguish sets him on an irreversible path into the Darkest of magics, and what he does will destroy everything he loves and holds dear.





	Called Out In The Dark

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote the beginning of this story way back in 2016, but lost the motivation (and time) to finish it. Please do let me know if you would be interested in reading the rest of it.
> 
> I kind of know how I want this story to end, but a warning! It'll be a bittersweet ending.

**_Prologue: The Summoning_ **

 

**_one._ **

 

It starts with bones, blood and an earlobe.

A blonde man lays crumpled against a massive gravestone, enclosed within the wings of the marble angel crouching over him protectively. The backs of the great wings are stained black, the stone shattered in places. The man stirs, a breath wheezing through chapped lips.

His eyes snap open, gleaming silver in the darkness. His breathing rapid and uneven, he scrambles onto his hands and feet, sinking into soft moist soil. The statue straightens up, stone grinding stone with a rumbling groan.

Draco Malfoy scans the silent graveyard, bewildered, unable to think why his ear is burning, why his fingers come away from his neck sticky with blood.

The clouds shift across the flat dark sky. The moonlight undulates across the ancient bone yard and illuminates the devastation. Headstones are broken and jagged like teeth in a chain smoker’s mouth. Statues are toppled and blackened, some of them still moving with the old magic imbued into their stone; it is a macabre puppet show.

There is a vaguely circular shape to the explosion, with Draco and the enormous stone cauldron in the very centre of it. He looks at the cauldron, taking in the runes carved into the grey surface, nearly unreadable in places where time smoothened the stone. The summoning runes are daubed in thestral blood, streaks running down the sides, trickling onto the dead brown grass below.

Draco remembers.

His wand, his wand, where the _fuck_ is his wand? Frantically searching through the grass, he slices his palms open on rock and marble fragments. He looks blankly at the blood pooling in his lifelines and wipes them on his robes. His wand is wedged between the broken parts of a headstone. He staggers to his feet, holding his wand out in front of him.

‘ _Lumos_ ,’ he whispers, and weak light wavers across the blackened grass.

The clouds drift across the moon, and the moonlight fades, the shadows thickening on the ground.

When he painted the last rune in blood, the world exploded with a wave of black light that blasted Draco into the arms of his statue saviour. He would be dead if it weren’t for the ancients’ ostentatious use of magic to honour their deceased.

He raises a trembling hand to his hurting ear. He had cast a rudimentary healing spell, but the explosion has ripped it open again. ‘ _Episkey_ ,’ he whispers. It is not enough to heal the loss of the earlobe, but it will slow the bleeding.

He licks his lips, tasting the ash on them, eyes fixed on the cauldron. He has not moved from the spot he landed in. His limbs are quivering, bone-deep. He cannot move. Salazar, he has come to the final moment, and _he cannot bloody move_.

The wind wails down the sloping sides of the wizarding graveyard, scattering pebbles and desiccated plants. The moon appears from behind the clouds, blazing down upon the stone cauldron. The night is not wicked, but gods, how much the moon loves to lend its power to the Dark Arts.

Draco squeezes his eyes shut, his cheek stinging where flying stone has cut him. He opens his eyes again. Reality lays before him. He staggers forward, grazes the ice-cold stone with his fingertips, and pulls himself closer. His heartbeat is thundering in his ears, blood pulsing hot in his neck. He grips the lip of the cauldron tighter.

And looks into the cauldron.

Shadows pool at the bottom, impenetrable even by moonlight. The cauldron smells of brimstone and ozone, an acrid stench that curls at the back of Draco’s throat. He waits.

There is a minute movement, a shift of something darker than shadow.

Within the cauldron, something is waking up.

****

**_ii._ **

 

Pansy was the one who gave him the idea.

She was curled up in the armchair before the fireplace, her head tucked beneath her arms, the empty wine bottle rolling at her feet. Draco slouched in the armchair next to her, hands loosely cupped around his glass of Firewhiskey. He stared into the leaping flames, entranced by the blackening wood and flitting sparks.

‘There is nothing you can do, Draco,’ Pansy said.

Draco’s mind was somewhere buoyant and fizzy, and it took a while for her words to travel through the clouds. He looked at her. She had emerged from under her arms, her face flushed from wine and pinched with sadness.

‘You have done all you can,’ she continued. ‘But … your mother …’ She trailed off, not wanting to say it.

Draco’s tongue was thick and heavy. He frowned, focusing on moving his tongue, his lips to form speech. ‘No.’

‘Draco …’ Pansy stretched out her hand, and he took it, her fingers curling against his palm. ‘Draco, you are a brilliant Healer. You have saved so many lives … but there is a limit to what our magic can do. There is no going against the Unseen Gods, you know that.’

Again: the tongue against the roof of his mouth, the slight pursing of his lips. ‘No.’

‘There is nothing you can do,’ his best friend repeated.

They fell silent. Draco closed his eyes against the brightness of the fire. He encircled Pansy’s thin, fragile wrist, rubbing his thumb against her pulse. Her skin was soft and warm. Pansy spoke up again, her words suffocating like thick snowfall in January.

‘You cannot go against Death himself, you know.’

Draco’s mind shuddered from the chill of the words. _You cannot go against Death himself, you know._

And then the crystallizing, the abrupt piercing awareness, the bright sharp thought like the searing heat of frost: _Why not?_

 

**_three._ **

 

Draco’s shallow breathing rasps in the silence. His whole being is taut, poised to flee or fight, he cannot tell. There is only anticipation in every muscle; there is no room for fear, not yet.

The thing in the shadows makes a sudden sharp movement – the raising of a head – and green eyes, hard and shiny as emeralds, are staring straight at Draco. They look at each other, the summoner and the summoned. The green eyes are wide and vacant; Draco cannot read them.

‘You summoned me,’ the creature says.

Draco flinches. It is a voice he knows well. How many times has he heard the voice swearing, shouting abuse at Draco, loathing and fury threaded through every syllable? Or the times he overhead the same voice, but softer and kinder and happier, whispering with a friend at the back of a classroom, laughter echoing in its wake? Yes, it is a voice he knows well.

The shadows shift. The thing inside the cauldron is moving, unfolding weak limbs, scrabbling at smooth curving stone, rising into the moonlight. Draco falls back, his breaths trapped in his chest, terror pooling within his ribcage, icy and paralysing. He stares at the thing he has summoned.

It is looking down at its hands, brown skin smeared with mud, fingernails encrusted with grave dirt. It moves the hands up to its face, down its neck, over the protruding ribs and prominent hipbones. It stares down at its feet still stuck within the leftover soup of potion. It is very still, the moonlight on its skin colouring it granite.

Slowly, slowly, it looks up at Draco. There is awareness in those green eyes, and a dawning horror creasing its soil-encrusted face.

‘Malfoy,’ Harry Potter says. ‘What have you done?’

 

**_iv._ **

 

Draco was in the Great Hall when Flitwick killed Voldemort.

He was cowering behind a table turned on its side, the floor beneath it scattered with dented silverware. Voldemort and little Flitwick turned a lethal dance of lurid red and green jets of light in the middle of the hall. Around them, the other dancers eddied, screams and cries echoing off the unseen ceiling and sounding eerily like ecstasy.

Neither Voldemort nor Flitwick missed a step. They were smooth and graceful and Draco, unable to look away, threw up a little in his mouth, nauseous with the crippling cramps in his stomach. _Fall_ , he thought, _FALL!_ He did not know whom he wanted to fall. He was only desperate for everything to just … _stop._

Then: Voldemort staggered. Flitwick didn’t hesitate. ‘ _Wingardium leviosa_!’ And a knife on the ground flew through the air, a silvery blur, and sank to its hilt deep in Voldemort’s chest. The Dark Lord looked down, his wand slipping from his fingers. He looked up again at Flitwick, amazed that a half-breed would be the end of him, amazed that he would die from such a Muggle wound. He fell to the ground, weightless, a farce of a man held together by Dark magic and willpower.

They had all stopped to watch him fall.

A tall, thin pillar of darkness: bowing like a question mark, tumbling into itself, folding into a period. With the soft _flump_ of tattered black robes, the Dark Lord died in a gentle expulsion of grey ash and smoke.

There was deep still silence.

Slowly, Flitwick – little Flitwick, kind, bumbling Flitwick – slipped to the ground, landing on his bum, staring blankly at nothing. Around the Great Hall, there was gentle movement: the release of tension, the gasp of relief, the trickling of disbelief.

None of them had truly thought it could end.

Harry Potter was dead, a limp pale corpse swathed in mourning black, and the Dark Lord had been gloating, screaming with laughter as he struck down the children in his way. His shriek was still echoing through the ruined hallways of Hogwarts Castle: _Hogwarts is mine now! The school is MINE!_

Voldemort was now dead too.

The tableau broke apart slowly at first, and then completely. Death Eaters fled, Aurors chasing after them, casting _Petrificus Totalus_ and _Incarcerous_. The shouts and screams returned in a flood, except now there were happiness and exhilaration.

Hiding in his corner, Draco dropped the two wands he couldn’t remember picking up. He raised his hands, the palms scraped and bleeding. He pressed his hot palms against his eyes, smelling the Fiendfyre infused in his robes, in his skin. He kept his eyes closed, safely ensconced in the illusory protection of a heavy wooden table.

When the wailing began, he could pretend to be apart from the grief. Despair at Harry Potter’s death was not for the likes of him, tears a privilege he had not earned. Instead, he dug a jagged thumbnail into the bright red tattoo on his left forearm, desperate to feel something other than the burn of Potter’s hand where Potter had grabbed to pull him out of the gaping maws of the Fiendfyre.

Vivid green eyes flashed before him, searing with their intensity, a thin sooty face grimacing in frustration, in fury.

He opened his eyes, looking instead at the Dark Mark. His thumbnail dug into the lines, the parted flesh weeping drops of dark blood. Elsewhere in the Great Hall, Potter’s family and friends were crying tears of salt. Draco – he knew he was only good enough to bleed for it where he trembled in the corner.

 

**_five._ **

 

There is a smell like an open grave, like a decaying house and moth-eaten tapestries. Potter stands in the cauldron, his arms bent at the elbow, held slightly away from his torso, as if he is not quite sure what to do with his body. He stares at Draco, looking young and vulnerable, seventeen years old again, while Draco wears the seven years and more in the lines on his face.

Draco swallows past the lump in his throat and pulls off his robes, the slithering of cloth absurdly loud in the graveyard. He holds it out to Potter. The boy stares at the bundled cloth for a few seconds before reaching out for it. His fingertips – ice-cold and wet – brush the back of Draco’s hand, and Draco is stumbling back before he realises it, his skin crawling with revulsion.

Potter freezes, his eyes on Draco’s face, but he does not say a word. He pulls the robes over his head and clambers out of the cauldron clumsily. He winces a little when his bare feet touch the bristly grass, unease flashing across his face. He looks around, taking in the wizarding graveyard rising around them, the statues occasionally shifting with slow deliberate movements. They are in the heart of the graveyard, at the place of honour where the wizarding world buried Harry Potter.

Draco watches him, still cold with fear and electrified by disbelief. He licks his lips. Opens his mouth. Potter looks at him, those green eyes alive and blazing with emotions. Draco jerks into motion, helplessly drawn by those eyes. He strides forward and grabs the front of the too-loose robes with both hands, tasting the grave dirt in his mouth. Potter tilts his head back slightly.

‘Are you Death?’ Draco’s voice comes out breathless, whispery. Broken.

Potter stares back. ‘You’re bonkers,’ he says, sounding awed. ‘You’re absolutely crazy. You were trying to call Death himself? Why the _fuck_ would you want that?’ There is heat in his voice now, a familiar anger Draco did not realise he missed until he has it back. ‘Malfoy, what the _fuck_ have you done?’

Draco steps back, wiping his muddy hands on his trousers, trying to rub away the sensation of having touched Potter’s waxy skin. _A corpse, a dead man, a_ corpse _._ He watches the anger surge across Potter’s pallid face, the fists clench and the muscle tauten. Potter takes a threatening step towards Draco, stinking of death and rot.

‘You’ve brought me back from the dead, Malfoy,’ Potter says in a low voice, the words flaying Draco open. ‘And you are going to pay for it.’

 

**_vi._ **

 

Draco bought a book on summoning rituals from a second-hand bookshop in Diagon Alley. He paid the bored cashier and walked out with the thin volume tucked into his pocket. He finished reading it in a single night, curled up by the fireplace, tired eyes scouring the yellowed pages. The previous owner had written a review of the book on the back end page: _Utter rubbish!_

Draco had to admit that the ritual for summoning Death, one of the Unseen Gods, seemed a little too straightforward. _Death_ , the book explained, _is inherently attracted to the living. It desires the invitation into our mortal realm. The main task for the summoner would be to create a suitable receptacle for Death._

It was a little more difficult finding a book on the potion the Dark Lord had used to create his new body. Difficult, but not impossible. After six months of searching every magical bookshop in the United Kingdom, Draco found a brief paragraph on it in a slender book the size of his hand trapped within the pages of a used Herbology text in a musty bookshop in Manchester.

 _A revolting practice. Not to be attempted,_ the text warned. _Bone of the father, flesh of the servant, and blood of the enemy._ That was it; there was no mention of the binding potion or the type of cauldron to be used or the time of year when the potion should be brewed. The writer had been too afraid to commit his knowledge of the potion into words, even in his travel journal. It was, after all, necromancy, the filthiest form of Dark magic to ever crawl in the shadows of this world, and Draco was chasing after it.

‘Draco, what is on your mind?’ his mother asked. She was smiling at him fondly from where she lay on the hospital bed, her face so pale and her hair so fair she seemed to sink into the white sheets. There were deep bruises beneath her eyes like thumbprints of purple-black ink.

He lowered the newspaper, smiling wryly because she had seen through his poor attempt to concentrate on the paper. She reached out a hand and he clasped it between his. Her bird-bones felt as fragile as porcelain.

‘I am thinking about the day you brought me to the zoo,’ Draco said quietly.

She closed her eyes, smiling. ‘When you were seven. Your father was furious. You threw tantrums for a week, demanding a dragon for a pet.’

‘That was a lovely day.’

‘Yes, it was. It would be nice to visit it again,’ she said with a sigh.

Draco hummed in agreement, watching her thin pinched face. Her parchment-coloured skin was stretched tight over a shiny bare skull and sharp cheekbones, deep lines at the corners of chapped lips and drooping eyes. Narcissa Malfoy had been the most beautiful girl in her year at Hogwarts; his father used to say it often, when Draco was much younger.

‘Mother, I will bring you to the zoo when it opens in the spring.’

Narcissa looked at him, chips of cloudless sky set in a worn face. She managed to smile, squeezing his fingers, before she looked away. There was no need for words. Draco sat with his mother in silence, once again lost in his thoughts of potion brewing. Tonight, he would test the seventy-fifth batch of the binding potion. He had made it in a pewter cauldron this time – it _had_ to be right.

In total, it would take him two years, ten months and twenty-two days before he got it right.

 

**_seven._ **

 

Draco is shaking his head, rifling through the pages of the summoning text he knows by heart now. His dirty fingers smear mud on the fragile pages, wriggly lines drawn by a trembling finger. No, he performed every step of the summoning ritual perfectly – the symbols drawn in the ground around them, the materials placed within the cauldron, the timing. He added the last three ingredients to the body creation spell, hence creating the vessel and activating the summoning spell. He had done it _right_.

‘Why did you do this?’

He looks up from where he is kneeling in the mud. Potter has not moved from the side of the cauldron. His anger has faded into confusion.

‘Why did you bring _me_ back?’

 

**_viii._ **

 

‘MALFOY!’ Potter was on a broom above Draco, hand reaching out. ‘TAKE MY HAND!’

Draco reached out, struggling to breathe past the choking smoke. Potter had stretched out, holding onto his broom only by his legs. Draco sobbed, arms extended as far as he could. Potter’s face flickered above him, lit by the green flames, and in a moment that seemed to last forever, Draco was transfixed by the sight.

The planes of his face rendered unearthly and breath-taking, eyes glowing with a refracted light, teeth bared in a fearsome grimace, Potter was no different from a demon.

A hand grabbed onto Draco’s wrist and his arm was nearly wrenched out of its socket as he was hauled onto the back of the broom. Draco immediately wrapped his arms around Potter’s waist, his chest flush with Potter’s back, clinging onto this solid weight in his arms.

‘HANG ON!’ Potter screamed over the roar of the Fiendfyre licking at their feet.

He twisted around, his body low over the broom. Draco was pressed over him, his arms trembling with the effort of holding him. He closed his eyes, refusing to see the flaming hell baying for his screams and ashes. It could not touch him now: he was with Potter, and he was saved.

**Author's Note:**

> Please do let me know if you would like me to continue. It would definitely serve as a great motivation to finish the rest of this story! Thank you for taking your time to read this, and it would be nice to hear from you :)


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